My neighbor brought over his pc that had crashed. we ran the HP recovery disk's to perform a total reformat and recover. Now we have a problem with the cd/rw drive is having trouble reading most disks. Many times with the "M:\ is not accessible not ready"
Why is the drive letter loaded as "M"? is something to do with HP. the unit only has one hard drive , a cdrw and a floppy.

I have had that problem too with our HP 8370, I cant remember how I got around it though. Do you get to the recovery screen? If so, does the problem start after formatting and when you are ready to recover files?

I was able to reinstall the operating system from the recovery CD. The drive seems to have problem reading, writing most disks. I changed the IDE cable. The drive is making a considerable amount of noise.